Facts about The Daguerreotype
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Daguerreotype plates were so fragile that a single fingerprint or breath of moisture could permanently damage the image surface, requiring operators to handle them exclusively with special tools and cloths.
- 16
Daguerreotype studios typically charged between fifty cents and three dollars per portrait during the 1840s, making professional portraiture accessible to the middle class for the first time in history.
- 15
The Daguerreotype process required careful chemical preparation involving silver plating, iodine fuming, and bromine sensitization before exposure, making it an elaborate multi-step procedure that only trained operators could successfully execute.
- 14
Daguerreotype production required heating mercury to 167 degrees Fahrenheit to create the amalgam that formed the image on the silvered copper plate.
- 13
Photography historians estimate that fewer than one million daguerreotypes were produced worldwide between 1839 and 1860, despite their revolutionary impact on portraiture.
- 12
Frames for daguerreotypes consumed significant resources, with cases made from leather, wood, or paper-mâché often costing as much as the photograph itself during the 1840s.
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A single daguerreotype plate could be viewed as either a positive or negative image depending on the angle and lighting conditions, creating an optical illusion that confused early nineteenth-century viewers.
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Wealthy daguerreotype subjects in the 1840s paid premium prices for hand-tinted portraits, with artists applying oils and watercolors to add color to the monochromatic silvered copper plates.
- 09
Daguerreotype cameras of the 1840s used simple lens systems that could only focus on objects at specific distances, requiring photographers to calculate exact positioning or risk producing blurred portraits.
- 08
Exposure to mercury vapor during daguerreotype processing caused chronic poisoning in many nineteenth-century photographers, producing tremors, tooth loss, and psychological disturbances collectively known as mercurialism.
- 07
Daguerreotypes could only produce positive images, meaning each plate was a unique original with no negative to create duplicates, making multiple copies of the same portrait impossible without rephotographing the subject.
- 06
Daguerreotypes were prone to tarnishing and required protective glass covers sealed with tape and paper to prevent oxidation of the delicate silver coating.
- 05
By 1850, competition from cheaper daguerreotypes had decimated the portrait miniature painting industry, which had thrived for three centuries before this photographic process made hand-painted portraits economically obsolete.
- 04
Daguerreotypes achieved such fine detail that a single 1840s portrait could contain up to 100 million individually distinguishable points of silver and copper, rivaling contemporary miniature paintings in microscopic precision.
- 03
In 1840, American John William Draper created the first successful daguerreotype portrait of a human face, his sister Dorothy, requiring approximately one hundred times less exposure than earlier landscape photographs.
- 02
Mirror-polished silver-coated copper plates used in daguerreotypes were typically 6.5 by 8.5 inches, making them small enough to fit in a vest pocket yet detailed enough to rival oil paintings.
- 01
Louis Daguerre's 1839 invention required 15 to 20 minutes of exposure time to create a single photographic image on a copper plate.